Nic Mcdonald
Senior Research Scientist at NVIDIA
Palo Alto, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNic Mcdonald is a Senior Research Scientist in Palo Alto with 12 years of experience designing high-performance networks, silicon-photonic switch architectures, and ASICs across NVIDIA, Google, and Hewlett Packard. He combines a Stanford Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering with hands-on hardware and software expertise—from high-radix switch microarchitectures and multi-chip-module designs to congestion control and network offload at hyperscale. At HPE he was a key architect of the Gen-Z routing specification and has repeatedly used data-driven simulation to guide novel co-packaged photonics and MCM switch designs. Known for diving deep into both system-level topology and low-level logic, he bridges research and product engineering to move architectures from simulation to deployable designs. He also brings a pragmatic engineer’s curiosity—“I enjoy being a nerd”—that fuels open tooling and reproducible experimentation.
12 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
The University of UtahDoctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Electrical Engineering, Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Electrical Engineering at Stanford University
Github Skills (159)
hugo-theme10
python10
simulator10
windows10
timing10
data-interchange10
protoc10
tdameritrade10
extensible10
scientific-computing10
forestry10
marshalling10
protocol-buffers10
linux10
slice10
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
nicmcd/libbits
Jan 2016 - Mar 2023
Contributions:28 pushes, 6 branches in 7 years 3 months
nicmcd/spinbench
Nov 2015 - Apr 2022
Contributions:16 pushes, 6 branches, 1 issue in 6 years 6 months
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